We need to stop whitewashing black death

Everyone is – or should be – horrified about the killing of George Floyd.

An 87-year-old woman said to me, furious: “It’s terrible what they did to that poor man! He was a school teacher. He’d never have had a fake banknote!”

I almost laughed. Why do we need our victims to be unimpeachable, to be heroes, or “decent” folk living neat, quiet lives in order to rail against their murder?

No, Floyd wasn’t a school teacher. He had a criminal record. He had a questionable $20 banknote. He was not a saint.

But does any of that matter? Do only the perfect deserve justice?

Floyd was suspected of a non-violent crime, yet a police officer knelt on his throat for eight minutes and 46 seconds, until he suffocated.

Handcuffed, his face crushed into the tarmac, Floyd narrated his own death: “I can’t breathe, mama, I can’t breathe…” until he couldn’t.

It is unconscionable.

But so too is the fact that people want a pretty narrative about a well-lived life in order to feel anger about an inhumane killing; so too is the fact that his grieving family must justify his existence – he was a gentle giant, a father, a brother, he was trying to build a better life – in order to demand justice for his death.

Floyd gets either damned or whitewashed, just like the other 1,000 civilians that US law enforcement officers kill each year, a disproportionate number of them black and unarmed.

And I say whitewashed advisedly: we white people do have white privilege, like it or not.

A Twitter user was talking about this disparity, about how he was once arrested for trying to spend a counterfeit note. He, a white man, got an amusing dinner party anecdote out of it. Floyd, a black man, got killed.

There was a picture taken at the Floyd protests of a group of white women forming a cordon between police and black people, shielding the protesters; there are videos of white college students leaping in front of black ones as police advance.

They know inherently – and proved again – what the Black Lives Matter movement keeps telling us: White Lives Already Matter.

Racism isn’t merely systemic; racism built the system.

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